Cell Phones in School

Many schools have gotten to the point where they have banned cell phones from their halls and classrooms, but is that the way to go. I believe that this is an old belief that all the cell phones are are a distraction due to texting. This is not the case however. Cell phones can do so much more now. They have internet access, Wi-Fi hot spots, and tens of thousands of applications that can server many different purposes. These new technologies of in the cell phone can be uselful in the classroom. The internet can be used in order to do research on a topic without having to get out the laptops, log on, and then wait for them to load. This will make the researching of an answer for a question in the middle of an activity much quicker and more effinient because you can have all the students looking it up. The applications have endless uses. There are applications for calculators, rulers, and so many others that the possibilities are endless for them.


Picture posted by Chrysora at Flickr.com

Kindles

There are so many new pieces of technology in the world today and one of them would be the eReaders that are available to us today. The most well-known is the Kindle which was created by Amazon.com in order to reach a higher number of buyers of books. The Kindle is simple to use and is fairly inexpensive compared to some of the other technologies that we have in the world. It is priced at a little under 200 dollars and the newest version comes with free Wi-Fi and 3G network that allows the owner to download books in 60 seconds from anywhere. This system allows the owner to have 3,500 books at their command anytime or anywhere that they want. The question that some have however is how can this be used in the classroom? The answer is that it will take some time before it can be fully used in the classroom as a replacement for textbooks and libraries. In order to do this, a school would need the funding to buy close to a hundreds of these Kindles in order to have enough for the high demand of free-reading books. Then there is the problem of the textbooks. Amazon has a fairly extensive selection of textbooks, but they do not have them all in ebook form yet. This will take some time, but when the electronic versions of these textbooks are finally made, we will see a large increase in the purchasing and use of the Kindle.


Photo posted by ShakataGaNai at WikiCommons.com

1 to 1 Computer Schools

The post for today is going to be based around the topic of schools that have decided to switch their style of teaching and learning to being more computer based. What the 1 to 1 ratio means is that each student in the school will get a computer. This also means that the school will need to get their school ready to be able to handle this many computers going at the same time. They will need to get a wireless network that covers the whole school, an in house technician which is an extra salary, and a way to control what the students are viewing on their computers while they are in the classroom. The other question that many people have is the issue of the textbooks that the students are currently using. Will the students continue to use these books and then use the computers off to the side or will they find a way to expand the online textbook library and use the online versions only? These are the many questions that the schools must ask themselves before switching over to this complicated system of learning, bu if they are successful in doing so, the possibilities for learning are endless.



  

Picture was found at Flickr.com and posted by NJLA: New Jersey Library Association